Читать книгу The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel онлайн | страница 16

What could this mean?

I awoke with a start, greatly troubled by my dream, and found a return to sleep almost impossible. It was clear that I would find no rest until I saw the lady once more.

The next morning we began our exploration of the marketplace. Stalls filled with exotic and extraordinary goods had been set out as far as the eye could see: embroidered cloths, capes and skirts; agave-fibred sandals, skins of wild beasts, cottons, sisal and ropes; robes made from the skins of pumas and jaguars, otters, jackals, deer, badgers and mountain cats. There were stalls selling the richest of spices: salt and sage, cinnamon, aniseed and black pepper; mecaxochitl, vanilla, ground hazelnut and nutmeg; achiote, chillies, jasmine and ambergris. Stalls of firewood and charcoal jostled with traders roasting fowl, foxes, partridges, quails, turtle-doves, hares, rabbits, and chickens as large as peacocks. There were even weapons of war, laid out for purchase, as their owners sharpened flints, cut arrows from long strips of wood and hammered out axes of bronze, copper and tin. There were flint knives, two-handed swords, and shields, all ready to be bartered, exchanged or sold.

There were thirty thousand people here, each in search of new delights. The method of buying and selling was to change one ware for another; one gave a hen for a bundle of maize, others offered mantles for salt. But everything was priced, and for money they used the strange brown almonds I had seen one of the natives spill in his canoe when we first arrived. These, we were told, were the beans of the cacao tree, and were held in great regard. One of them could buy a large tomato or sapota; a newly picked avocado was worth three beans, as was a fish, freshly prepared on a stall and wrapped in maize. A small rabbit would sell for thirty beans, a good turkey hen might cost a hundred, and a cock twice that amount.

From another corner of the marketplace rose the smell of cooked food: roasted meat in various sauces, tortillas and savoury tamales, maize cakes, dishes of fish or tripe and toasted gourd seeds sprinkled with salt or honey.